Guy is, I believe.. a racist!

Having a bias is an easy thing to be a part of and when you are in the media, it is even more enticing. So what is Fox news is ( out loud) biased against the Dems!

It was only yesterday we were discussing the classification of US presidents. One would Bill Clinton in one of those orator kinds and Bush into some lower level then that. Don’t blame me for that, his English ( remember the time when you get news saying “InternetS”) is terrible for being American. But the fact is for Obama you can’t find a category.

If I could go in the future and see what category future generations of US have put Obama in, it would most expectedly be in the ranks of Lincoln. I am super sure about it. And fox ended up saying that Dems, especially the comment that Obama is racist.

I am out and proud that I like Obama. But atleast I am not slave of my prejudice and I can stand upto him and say you are wrong here or you need to do this better! Grow up Fox!

Good… Is not good enough!

It seems as if whatever we attempt to do or actually do, is usually measured by some standard or another. But what is good? Define good.

Good for me might not just be fair for you and vice versa!      

These are my thoughts -> As human beings, we have a moral duty to make the best of what we have and what we were given.  In the process, we must/should try to become the best of human beings, and sometimes in the process, we must stop for a moment and ask ourselves “What is good enough? What is the best for me? ” Good enough is sometimes not just enough.

I had this epiphany “Good…. Is not enough?”  With all of my good intentions, trying to pull off my “normal” lifestyle, it appeared that even though I was putting my best foot forward, it is just not worth it and the task that lies ahead is herculean and our efforts are futile.  May someday when it comes to you will understand what I mean!

It doesn’t make me nervous, but makes me realize that someone is bigger than us and that someone expects more out of me.

10/19/2009 update!

I received the email from one of my daily alerts – AstheManThinketh.net, and it said something like this

“Doing good is not enough when you are trying to become GREAT !”  Now I know, why good is not good enough.

A good and a bad day!

With the last day of September, I took time to reflect what I did involve in this entire month. But the point of this post is about Last day of September – Sep 30 – which means my second day of diet planning..

Today I ate just about nothing the whole day! Not because I wanted Erick to see I can survive on below 2000 calories but I wanted to take less calories in general and what it turned out to be that I didn’t eat much at all.

In retro, when I see myself during the events and the day in particular, I don’t feel that way, but my stomach complained in the night, which I remember quite distinctively Adding from the point that I ate just above 1700 Calories on the day1, I ate just about a little above the half of the same amount on day 2

1. Milk and oatmeal cereal (warm) – 8:00 am– 200 cal
2. Fat free Yogurt cup – 60 cal – 12:00
3. Flattened rice made up with oil, onions, mustard seeds, ginger garlic paste, and boiled potato (1 normal size) – 600 Cal – 1:00pm – Whoa look at that! PS: The portion size was big so is the amount of cal
4. Two hotdogs with buns and mustard sauce – 200 Cal – 6:00 pm
   
5. Five strawberries – 50 Cal – 9: 00 pm

There you go, a near about 1100 Cal. Now you are probably wondering what is the bad about this day? You ate less calories and this will help you be lean sooner! RIGHT. ?? Well the answer is YES and NO.

Yes because eating less calories will definitely help me burn the already present cal (flab) and this way, because for everyday activities body needs around 3000 calories and rest of the gap would be used from your own existing flab and this will result in burning the fat and appear you leaner!

But wait before you can celebrate this lean moment of happiness! Why?

NO because if I continue this way, my body will soon realize this that it is faced with a starvation situation and guess what happens next – because of less calories, my metabolism runs towards the body itself to nourish it.

Now this is more complex than you think. Body is made of proteins and fats and many more things. When body understands that it is malnourished, the body metabolism slows down and starts to look for food in the body since it is not getting any from outside. That being said, since the metabolism is slowed down, it moves towards slowly digestible food and that is usually proteins. Surprised are you? Well don’t be. Body reacts differently than we think it will.

When our body is underprovided with food, the slowed metabolism doesn’t have the strength or will to go look for food around bones ( that is where fat is stored), alternatively what it does is that it goes to nearby muscle tissue and starts eating it up. Slowly and slowly the size of the muscle tissues becomes smaller and smaller and hence you become leaner and leaner, but this is very harmful for body.

Decay of proteins is a long process and is a continuous process whereas fat decay is short and fast process. Once your body starts eating tissue, you will feel leaner but you will also feel weaker as compared to when you lose fat, you feel better about yourself.

Now, let me tell you why is it bad? For a simple reason is that you can add carbs to your diet and fat will come back quickly to your body, whereas in case of proteins, this is not the case. First off, proteins are usually very less in food as compared to fats, and they are hard to extract from food for the body. Second the process to extract the proteins and then use it to create muscle tissue is a long process often multiple days extending upto a week and comes back really slow.

So, eating less can be good, but bad too! Be careful what you eat! And how much you eat! And most importantly eat healthy!

Calorie Count – Day 1 – 09/29/09

As a part of the ongoing sequence of events, I will post my food everyday for 21 days from today and then we will re-visit it and see how successful we are in becoming lean! This list will also have an estimated Calorific value and time

Here goes for the day 1

1. Oatmeal Cereals with milk ( warm) – 8: 00 AM – 250 Cal

2. Boiled White Kidney beans curry ( small bowl) with rice ( small bowl) – 1:oo pm – 400 Cal

3. Banana – 3:00 pm – 90 Cal

4. Cheetos packet – 5:00 pm – 150 Cal

5. Oatmeal Cookies ( 2) – 7: 00 pm – 180 Cal

6. Boiled White Kidney beans curry ( small bowl) with rice ( small bowl), small yogurt pack & wheat bread slice (2) – 8:00 pm – 200 + 200 + 60 + 200 = 660 Cal

7. Water – 10:00 am, noon, 2:00 pm, 6:00 pm and multiple other times — 3- 4 litres of water -  O Cal

In all, around 1700 calories with no meat whatsoever!

War of weights!!

DISCLAIMER: This is beginning of new series for 21 days! And I hope to struggle through it ! Why 21 days? Three weeks and then we will review how things are and what we can do about them!

I was 190-ish pounds earlier this year, for more than 6 feet in height and that didn’t made me nervous at all. It however did made me curious as to how to put off weight and if not, then how to maintain myself at this number. A weight of around 190 pounds isn’t that bad for a person of my height ( See BMI for yourself, I swear I am not lying)and physical strength, but I argue that I can be better!

So keeping this theme in mind, I have pretty much tried a lot of healthy foods, salads, vegetarian sandwich (without cheese, of course), switched back and forth between different kinds of vegetarian foods, and also kept my life connected with exercise ( as much as it was possible with swimming, cardio, Yoga and weight training).

Like everyone, when faced with dire question of starvation and eating, I chose eating – then it might be a subway meal or an oatmeal raisin cookie! Yes I did!  Beat it!  I indulged into very occasional ice cream/frozen custard eating. And I don’t think that is bad because this is what you do, treat yourself for having to diet and exercise so much to help you “Look healthy and pretty”

Unlike everyone I didn’t fret about it later! You got to treat yourself with respect and dignity even though you might hate what you see after shower! So after nine months of discipline and over indulgence sometimes in different kind of healthy foods and occasional deviant eating habits, I am still at 190 pounds. That’s not bad! Right J

As the Gurus say, you got to keep track of what you eat and you will know how much you are eating. So here goes nothing. I have to put up with the challenge of meeting my fate of “becoming lean” by monitoring what I eat and how much quantity I eat and how many calories it gives me.

As my roommate Erick tells me “Dude, it is hard to keep your diet under 2200 calories a day”. Taking inspiration from this, I am going to set a limit of 2000 calories for each day.

Review of “Confessions of an economic Hit Man (EHM)”

Book cover

I don’t exactly remember which of my friends and/or acquaintances told me to read this book in the first place, and like always I added this book to my “to be read” list and decided to wait whenever it’s turn comes up in the my list.

Initially I had reservations reading this book. For a guy like me who had none whatsoever background of accounting & economics, words like Economic Hit Man were totally intimidating. My first reaction to the title was of fear. It appeared daunting and a bit of too subjective to read. It is not clear to me, what made me read this book – my internal ability to push myself to do new (read weird) things and keep myself open (read vulnerable) to everything or my ability to torture myself with most awkward things in life just because I want to see myself as strong (read Mighty STRONG) or just random curiosity. But whatever it was, I can’t thank it enough for making me read this book and completing it till the very end.

John Perkins writes very candidly about his life, his geographically widespread professional entourage, turbulent personal accidents and of all the stories which his experience brought to him. The book started with a confused and a not clear note, which is acceptable given the fact that the reader should be able to put things in “his perspective” rather than putting things in “author’s perspective”.

At first I guessed that this book would be a fable of some economic blunders made in the US economy and some of its “free trade partners” in this global economy, but to my surprise this book contained that and much more.

The way John passes through countries through countries and explains tirelessly about what MAIN Corporation stands for and how MAIN reaped him in, intertwined with the notion of personal life as well is nothing short of indescribable. Earlier just professional and later his personal experiences started to revolve around MAIN’ strategy to expand the global empire and meeting to my realms of understanding, this thirst of oil continues to evade US supported MAIN from one continent to another.

Horrifying examples of Ecuador, Panama, Indonesia, and Canal country are meant to open the eyes of the readers and the masses (by a long shot though) to the corporate bureaucracy. The author coined a new term out of it, which is interesting too. The book clearly shows that the oldest democracy in the world has outlawed all the international laws (the experience stories about Vietnam and Iraq war), nullified all the popular democracy movements in the targeted countries (for e.g. Canal), CIA assassinations imprints (for example, murder of Roduge) all over the books, colossal amount of national debts incurred to these countries in lieu of providing foreign aid for building infrastructure ( such as highways, dams, power plants, oil plants and many more), loss of national freedom, and many similar activities.
Why this book & its controversial experiences seem to me as different is a good question that I am asking myself, way before even I thought I would write a review about it.

Big fish still eats the small fish. A mightier country today dictates the smaller country by means money (read foreign aid), technology transfer (read lobbying for concessions and army base) and sometimes war (read US supported army coup). Oil thirst seems to overtake everything else in the world and on this planet. NOTHING stands in front it. The fact that first EHMs are sent to a country to investigate and prepare the ground to a new country and if that fails, the jackals are sent shows the pinch of might these bigger conglomerates have over you and my daily affairs.

Each one of us likes to think that I am free and I am equal as guaranteed by the constitution (this is usually true for most of the countries, irrespective of where you belong to and from where you are reading this), but in the bigger picture, these big money earning and oil thirsty juggernauts will destroy the very fundamental of freedom by enslaving everyone of us with their products, services and money.

To our greatest fear, even today the imperialism prevails. It really doesn’t matter that which nation you are reading this entry from, but it matters what history you nation has and most importantly what it is going through now. Imperialism as we knew it, ended ages ago. Now you don’t see geographically spread colonies and rampant human slavery, but you see huge national debts of countries once rich with natural resources, now we don’t see blacks and browns tortured because of their skin color (partly thanks to the system and partly to education that let’s everyone to be seen as equals), but we see good people like John Perkins working as EHM and helping to create global empires for the countries like this one on the expense of so many others.

You can visit this page to read on goodreads
or visit my page at blogger at http://myownhope.blogspot.com/

How are we doing yet? Still hanging in here or left? — Part II

Continuing from my previous blog post,

3. Prepare a list of word templates you will need to react, reply and respond to the kind of answers you get from Professors.

Personally I had three prepared for myself

The first one was a more generic template. It expressed my interest in clear, concise and crisp grammatically correct English. You have to make changes regarding the research section, papers and your interests, etc.

The second one was a thank you reply! Unfortunately some professors will not “click” with your mails and profiles as some other will. As one of my friend who already got into the Phd program at New Zealand’s University of Auckland Dept of Imaging Science, he told me

Only 20 percent of the professors you approach in all, will acutually reply back.

The point here to be noted is that it is just a reply. It can be the most obvious one

Thanks your interest in our Phd program. You should apply through the admissions office at ZZZZZ@akd.edu

this one takes the cake!

Thanks your interest in our Phd program. Unfortunately, I am not taking any more students And/or Not teaching at the school anymore and/or Not full time faculty at the time
and/or I am on Sabbatical
(No offense. This kind of replies,make my day actually. You push me down. I will keep on coming up even with more force. The more you push me down, the more I will come up again to fight back)

So, if you get one of these replies, please don’t forget to send them a courtesy emails thanking them for time. Because you didn’t ask them before flooding their email inbox(s) and you wanted to see if you reach a common ground!

I know I do this everytime. And I know I would like to see a thank you note(atleast) from the person who sent me the first horrendously complex introductory emails. But that is just me

And the last tip for the post, don’t forget to keep your profile ( Academic Resume, Summary of interests, Linkedin Profile, email accounts, phone numbers, etc.) updated!!

Keep sharing and following! Have a good day! As again, I would love to read your stories

Share your stories and follow. I need motivation so does everyone So, just keep it on !!

Have a good day!

The beginning – How it started?

Disclaimer: This blog post is written with the intention of sharing one of my important life altering moments and is solely written to express my gratitude towards that moment and Mr. KJ.

It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.
— Carl Sagan

It was sort of early evening in August of 2005 when sun was about to go for the day. Faintly I remember, there was absolutely no hope of winds in the air and with it’s sultry outlook, I understood it was the beginning of fall that year. Entering from outside was my own barely seen shadow passing by the first gate. On the left I saw our dogs Bruno and Tommy. If I remeclearly year 2005 was Bruno’s third birth year and for obvious reasons he was young and sturdy. He would play with me all the time and whereas Tommy on the other hand was fragile and pale looking. Well it is not his fault. Breed of that dogs are known to be of similar health. And more importantly, playing with Tommy was never my fun moment.

As I entered my  own house complex from the gates after the first black gate, I saw KJ aka Mr.Tenant. He is one of brothers of our tenants. Over the last ten years, they have enjoyed living here and as much we have enjoyed having them here. Even though they decided to move out in late 2008 to their own house. I continue to wander myself with them. Last time I talked to him, he works at a deluxe group of hotels in New Delhi, near to the north campus Delhi University.
He as I walked to the main entrance of our house was standing and he looked into my eyes and said “What’s up?”

I replied “Hello! Nice weather outside! I was just coming from my private tuition classes. How are you doing?”

He looked calm and said “How is your application process coming along? So are you still applying for the schools in the US and New Zealand?” He looked intrigued.

I looked perplexed clearly. I was befuddled to decide to lend my voice to which of my thoughts? Agreeably, I had so many of them and all of them crushed my sanity to death every second in my mind. Going into the whirlwind of thoughts and the actions all around those thoughts, I got even more confused..what should I say, yes to US, maybe to New Zealand schools..! Which schools? New York, Missouri or Auckland or Christchurch!! What should I say? Which of the countries I should go to?

He looked at me and I looked back at him and said “Honestly I have been thinking what to do. I have this imbroglio of choosing the right university and country in the background. I am young in my education and I think it would be a decent decision to choose US for obvious reasons.”

I stared right into his eyes and wandered away immediately after that. In the backdrop, I realized that it was hard for me to capture my thoughts in totality and let myself be sure of one definite thought.

I continued saying “I am actually a little inclined to go to New Zealand. I got family there. It might of some assistance when I am alone and may need something. This country is growing and life standards are equally good. May be if I stay over a little longer, I can stay because New Zealand is happy to have educated people on their land.” He looked to the tree to his left in our garden and then he looked at me. He said something that I haven’t forgotten till day.

He said “Look. No matter what comes by your way and what options you have, always try for the first best. If you do not have the option of trying for the first best, then settle for the second best. But never ever settle for the second best!”

Startled I looked at him.

I said to one own-self in my mind “Yeah, this is something concrete. But I still don’t know what option is the right one.”

Again, I looked at him and said “Uh, yeah. You know what, it helps. May be, it’s a little easier with that thought in my head now. Thank you!”. He looked at me & smiled.

“You’re welcome”, he said.

And it was in one moment, it was so clear to me what I was missing. And in one moment I knew what I was supposed to do. No confusion any more grip my mind and I was already ware what kind of school I was going to try.

This is nothing more than a regular short small talk type of conversation. But if you read between the lines, it is easier to see and you will see that the message is a lot bigger. Never settle for the second best option. One should always aim for the first best, that too always. Always First best!! Just the very first best, always!

Thought I would share with you guys how my journey to achieve the very best started. On another note, my journey to achieve the very best has started on a good note, but it is long way from halting now.

Fair day people!

Country/Schools update – New Zealand first

Fair day people! In last two weeks or so, I have applied to various universities around the world ( See my previous blog on which countries I applied). Even though I started and spent most of my learning (how to approach professors and schools) time for US schools such as Cornell and Yale, I am glad to inform that I have completed my first round of phd e-mails to

New Zealand – (1) – University of Auckland

Remember my last post about countries short-listing, for the most part University of Auckland at New Zealand (Business School) ranks low on the catch part for me. As you know I want to research in the field of “the strategic implementation and supply chain integration of information systems”. I applied to the head of the Department since I was unable to find/locate any relevant and descriptive research interests for any of the faculty members. (Tip#1)

On the other note, there are some schools that you think are easy for you and some are tough. This is the easy one. I am sure that my profile makes it very competitive for them to not select them. This is a good thing, as I see for now.

The information systems department is associated with the department of business at UoA and I approached one of the ranked professors at this school. Simple method! Show your interest in the program and professor’s research. Don’t forget to send your latest updated academic resume attached!

Note: Please remember faking your research interest won’t take you anywhere. You are going to be out even before you got in to the school. Since Phd is a very serious affair, do what you really like. It is okay to be confused (for now) however, but liking for the sake of liking will not go very far. Take time to explore Professor’s latest papers and his research interests. In my exploration experience ( as I say it), for ninety percent of the professor’s, their homepage or faculty page will have a separate section called Research Interests which will clearly say what his/her interests are. Now, all you have to do is to figure out if your research interests match upto his/ her research interests. I think even if it is remotely similar, you stand a shot of getting a good reply. So don’t worry if that is not exactly what you are willing to do, just go ahead and write a note to the professor asking for details on his research interests and also don’t forget to write your interests!

Stay tuned for more schools/countries update next!

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A random old post – Career Interests – Reflects my views in 2005

Albert Einstein once said

” I never think of the future – it comes soon enough. “

My prejudiced opinion about future has been considerably influenced by this quote. I religiously follow this thought as my guideline for today’s Karma. In short, I live in today.

My career interests are varied. As the years have passed, more and more varied interests got added to my “favorites” list. I always wanted to become an engineer, which I did when I graduated in Aug ’06.

Telecommunications was and is, one of my hot craves. Deep inside this area has further more complex areas of interests, which are CDMA, GSM and VoIP. In the similar group, telecommunication industry offers Broadband Over Power Line(BPL).
This was my old love which seems to have taken a back seat since last year.

Ability to maintain data and manipulate information in the form of tables and SQL queries is what developed my penchant for databases. My specific goals are to work towards Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and develop existing compatibility tools between databases and front-ends.

E-Commerce is the youngest member of my old times love. The fact that the actual business can be run, fully automated on the internet is what inclined me to this subject. My first encounter with this subject was rather superficial and was limited to a brief introduction about this topic. But the subject interest brought a point where I changed my focus of research towards SOA and Business E-Commerce.

Υποδοχή to my new craze of Management of Information Systems (MIS). In case, you could not understand the first word of this line, it is greek translation for welcome
The world of business is very much dependent on technology and so is technology on business. Greater developments in technology has enabled nearly complete automation of business processes. The extent of automations has touched every silos of almost all organizations. Reaching out to the business people and understanding what they do and making sure that technology is doing exactly what it is required to do by the overall process of automation.

The process of discovering this new member of my knowledge castle is exciting and is keeping my involved. My career target positions at the beginning level are ERP Analyst or Junior Analyst, Website Designer & developer, Database Administrator, Database Application Designer !!